-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
On Thursday 16 Jan 2003 4:56 pm, Stalker, Doug wrote:
> I still have one question: if the initial RamDisk image is on a SCSI disk,
> and if the SCSI drivers are in the initial ramdisk, how does it get loaded
> in the first place? I assume it's some sort of lilo trick, since adding
> initrd=/foo.img to the boot parameters doesn't work but adding
> initrd=/foo.img to lilo.conf and running lilo does. Does lilo copy the
> initial ramdisk to the bootsector or some such?
This is down to the bootloader in question (not just LILO), but basically what
happens is that the boot loader pre-loads the initrd image into a
pre-arranged section of memory and then starts the kernel. The kernel RAM
disk driver starts, spots the initrd image and maps that in as a filesystem,
unless the noinitrd option is passed to the kernel (in which case it makes it
available as /dev/initrd).
There's an excellent paper on the Linux boot up sequence available from:
ftp://icaftp.epfl.ch/pub/people/almesber/booting/bootinglinux-current.ps.gz
- --
Chris Samuel Wollongong, NSW
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux)
iQEVAwUBPiZT8o1yjaOTJg85AQHfsQf+Ms6tLXqrTlTAzOhd1IfUd8yRtHgG5k11
B2P6NUl1hVVnnAjMIYDFCtGq2HG51HSqr/YnWRUtNc9WCnU3K5YFzZl6essVQa4p
OEF+61Cdh1XMlEVAOvEdceF0cFoKXmFCQOuf+N12Ql7kXmcCk+kW8UXIEpRXvy37
Hu2qrZMIo59raR6rZxvGivfblKizCvcGCSon+xdOVJQbMNRo2T1SY4fai+pJRDB1
/oJXDKfT+s9c/Qv2fcwCsu1Lrpk1QVwIxboSKk7abVVz/KJErsiChqPxwbDElfqK
foMqXQREwajKibCEd3mjw7KR53CYWlKAGI/Lgp2qt78YZVhK5naJrg==
=gpei
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
